Publication Date: 8 June 2023

The Blurb

BERLIN 1961

Anja and Monika live opposite each other. They play together every day, with Otto the cat.

One night they wake up to bangs and shouts. Soldiers are building a huge barbed wire fence between them. A terrible forever wall that gets longer and higher until it divides the whole city.

On the East side, Monika is scared – neighbours are becoming spies and there are secret police everywhere.

It’s Anja who spots that Otto has found a way across. If he can visit Monika, then perhaps she can too.

But Anja gets trapped and there’s no safe way back …

The Review

I am a huge fan of Dan’s writing, so it was with great expectations that I sat down with The Wall Between Us, and I was utterly blown away. To think that the GDR regime was still in place in my lifetime – and I remember watching the fall of the Berlin Wall on the news!

Anja and Monika’s story is set in what feels like a terrifying dystopian world, yet it is one that existed in living memory. Dan has brought the terror of Berlin in 1961 to life in a gripping, unsettling read that will stay with me for a very long time.

Told through files, letters and newspaper articles, they really rooted the story in the reality that families would have lived. Most disturbing were the extracts from the Stasi files – as the reader, we could see a disastrous conclusion to Anja’s trip across the wall was coming, which cranked up the tension with each creaking floorboard and turn of the page.

The differences between life in the East and West came through in the availability of different food and drink, and the freedom of ideologies and movement. While Anja is free to do and say what she wants, Monika must conform to societal norms, such as attending Young Pioneers, and ensuring she doesn’t speak ill of the GDR when anyone might hear as neighbours turned on neighbour.

Tears were plentiful at the end – at the hurt and humiliation caused by the GDR regime, and the hope that humanity holds on to. That there wasn’t a safe place in the society for anyone is sobering – the enemy was sometimes only that through necessity.

With places in our world that still restrict democracy, freedom of speech and impose strict ideologies, this is a must read for building empathy so that future generations understand, and see the dangers of societal division and work to remove them.

Huge thanks to Chicken House for sending me a finished copy for review.